To a trance of passive glory, you might see
In apparition on the golden sky

(Alas, my Giotto's background!) the sheep run
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice
That run along a witch's scarlet thread.

THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND.

I learnt to love that England. Very oft,
Before the day was born, or otherwise
Through secret windings of the afternoons,
I threw my hunters off and plunged myself
Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear
And passion of the course. And when at last
Escaped, so many a green slope built on slope
Betwixt me and the evening's house behind,
I dared to rest, or wander, in a rest
Made sweeter for the step upon the grass,
And view the ground's most gentle dimplement,
(As if God's finger touched, but did not press
In making England) such an up and down
Of verdure, nothing too much up or down,
A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop so tenderly and the wheatfields climb;
Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew,—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,-
I thought my father's land was worthy too
Of being my Shakespeare's.

Ofter we walked only two,

If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.

We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced.

We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched:

Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,

And thinkers disagreed, he, overfull

Of what is, and I, haply, overbold

For what might be.

But then the thrushes sang,
And shook my pulses and the elms' new leaves;
At which I turned, and held my finger up,
And bade him mark that, howsoe'er the world
Went ill, as he related, certainly

The thrushes still sang in it. At the word
His brow would soften,-and he bore with me
In melancholy patience, not unkind,

While breaking into voluble ecstasy

I flattered all the beauteous country round,
As poets use, the skies, the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold;
The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
'Twixt dripping ash-boughs,-hedgerows all alive
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies,
Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind;
Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills;
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,
Confused with smell of orchards. 'See,' I said,
'And see! is God not with us on the earth?
And shall we put him down by aught we do?
Who says there's nothing for the poor and vile
Save poverty and wickedness? behold!'
And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped
And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.

A SIMILE.

Every age,

Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned

By those who have not lived past it. We'll suppose Mount Athos carved, as Alexander schemed,

To some colossal statue of a man.

The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little as the browsing goats
Of form or feature of humanity

Up there, in fact, had travelled five miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,

Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky
And fed at evening with the blood of suns ;
Grand torso,-hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down

To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus
With times we live in,-evermore too great
To be apprehended near.

MARIAN'S CHILD.

There he lay upon his back,

The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples,-to the ends
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;
For since he had been covered over-much
To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose
The shepherd's heart-blood ebbed away into
The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant; in the pretty baby-mouth,
Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked,
The little naked feet, drawn up the way
Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft
And tender, to the tiny holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of 't.

While we stood there dumb,

For oh, that it should take such innocence

To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb,—.

The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,

And, staring out at us with all their blue,

As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence, gradually
He saw his mother's face, accepting it

In change for heaven itself with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there,-never moved,
But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,

So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said?
As red and still indeed as any rose,

That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content in blowing to fulfil its life.

THE JOURNEY SOUTH.

I just knew it when we swept

Above the old roofs of Dijon : Lyons dropped
A spark into the night, half trodden out

Unseen. But presently the winding Rhone

Washed out the moonlight large along his banks,

Which strained their yielding curves out clear and clean To hold it,-shadow of town and castle blurred

Upon the hurrying river. Such an air

Blew thence upon the forehead,—half an air
And half a water, that I leaned and looked,
Then, turning back on Marian, smiled to mark
That she looked only on her child, who slept,
His face toward the moon too.

So we passed
The liberal open country and the close,

And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedge

By great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,

Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,

And lets it in at once: the train swept in

Athrob with effort, trembling with resolve,

The fierce denouncing whistle wailing on

And dying off smothered in the shuddering dark, While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressed

As other Titans underneath the pile

And nightmare of the mountains. Out, at last,
To catch the dawn afloat upon the land!

—Hills, slung forth broadly and gauntly everywhere,
Not crampt in their foundations, pushing wide
Rich outspreads of the vineyards and the corn,
(As if they entertained i' the name of France)
While, down their straining sides, streamed manifest
A soil as red as Charlemagne's knightly blood,
To consecrate the verdure. Some one said,
'Marseilles !' And lo, the city of Marseilles,
With all her ships behind her, and beyond,
The scimitar of ever-shining sea

For right-hand use, bared blue against the sky!

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I felt the wind soft from the land of souls ;
The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,
One straining past another along the shore,
The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts,
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peak
They stood: I watched, beyond that Tyrian belt
Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship,
Down all their sides the misty olive-woods
Dissolving in the weak congenial moon,
And still disclosing some brown convent-tower
That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,

Or many a little lighted village, dropt
Like a fallen star upon so high a point,
You wonder what can keep it in its place
From sliding headlong with the waterfalls
Which powder all the

With spray of silver.

Was stealing on us.

myrtle and orange groves
Thus my Italy

Genoa broke with day,

The Doria's long pale palace striking out,

From green hills in advance of the white town,

A marble finger dominant to ships

Seen glimmering through the uncertain gray of dawn.